


half awake in a fake empire

by celaenos



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Gen, One Shot, episode 92
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-27
Updated: 2020-01-27
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:35:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22441903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/celaenos/pseuds/celaenos
Summary: “You hang onto that for me, little man,” she whispers. She opens her mouth to say something else, but she can’t make it work. Beau breathes in, wet and heavy from the tears that she doesn’t want to fall.
Relationships: Beauregard Lionett & Thoreau Lionett, Beauregard Lionett & Thoreau Lionett Jr.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 124





	half awake in a fake empire

Beau gulps in air, blinks to clear the stinging in her eyes, and tries very hard to look like a normal person making a social call and not someone on the verge of a breakdown.

He’s cute—that’s the first thing that Beau makes a note of. It nettles a bit, that he has their father’s name, but it’s not all that surprising.

_Their father._

Fuck; it’s one thing to know that he exists, it is another entirely to stare at a round little face grinning back up at her. She is not gonna call him Thoreau—it’s a stupid name for a little kid, anyway. “Hey TJ,” Beau whispers and watches him light up.

_Oh._

_Fuck, fuck, fuck._

His nose kind of looks like Beau’s. The corners of their mouths match. Same color hair. TJ toddles over and throws his arms around Beau’s neck. She feels herself crumple against him, closing her eyes and letting herself enjoy this one moment in the middle of this shitstorm. She hasn’t spent much time with little kids but _damn,_ this might be one of the best feelings in the whole world. TJ pulls back and Beau doesn’t even think about it, doesn’t look up at her friends or her parents or take a beat, just tugs the necklace off and hands it over. Absently, she hears Jester suck in a breath, her father makes some indescribable noise—Beau ignores it all and watches TJ slobber all over the thing.

She grins.

“That’s been in some dank places,” she tells him. “It’ll build up your immune system.” TJ beams and slobbers, his hand resting on Beau’s check. It’s a nothing sort of gesture; a quick brush of the skin, nothing more, nothing less. It’s the sort of thing you do to say, _here I am, and here you are, and here we are, then_ ; a reassurance of presence. Beau has never met TJ before today, but he has done this before. He knows what it means in his bones, some ancient human instinct that sticks with you from birth. Beau swallows thickly; there is too much empathy in his small body.

Beau puts her hand on his face, too. He slobbers happily on the necklace and one of her fingers. Beau loves him—instantly—more than she has ever loved another soul in her life.

He toddles away from Beau after a minute and she can’t help but feel cold. She knows that now she has no excuse but to look up at her parents and her friends—she doesn’t want to do it.

Pain and panic have a way of distorting time, ballooning it, then compressing it again; by the time that Beau looks back up and meets her father’s gaze, it feels like a million years have passed. Behind her father, Clara looks between Beau and Thoreau—thoughtful, if a little disturbed. Beau clenches her jaw and swigs the wine in her hands. She doesn’t look up at any of her friends, only catches her mother and TJ slipping out of the room from the corner of her eye. Beau plants her gaze somewhere just to the left of her father’s face and listens to the same fucking story that she’s heard a million times since she was TJ’s age.

Beau focuses on the details and thinks about how this all affects _Nott._ She doesn’t look over at Yasha, leaning against a wall with her arms crossed, or Caleb, back ram-rod straight as he stares at Thoreau; Fjord, silent, feigning casual as he sits on a chaise beside Caduceus and Nott. She especially doesn’t look over at Jester, barely an inch from her side, equal parts glaring up at Thoreau and glancing hopefully between them.

 _I’ve not been the pinnacle of a father in the same way that you’ve haven’t been the pinnacle of a daughter,_ echoes through her skull, reverberating against the tale of the witch and Beau can’t keep her focus on the actual words that her father is saying. She presses her palms into her eyes.

“Maybe I’m the one that’s sent to humble you,” Beau says and her father inhales and looks down to the ground before meeting her eye. Luckily, they’re standing here in this living room full of other people because suddenly, his face is—no longer human. It's the closest descriptor that Beau can grasp for. Nothing exactly about her father's face has changed in the few last moments; nothing that Beau could point her friends to, except to say that it’s gone wrong. Beau feels a shiver roll up her spine, old and familiar, one of those things that goes straight past clear-cut thought to animal intuition. She is incredibly grateful when he panics at her words and runs out of the room to give her another stupid jade necklace.

“You’re doing great!” Nott says and Beau wants to throw up on her and hug her all at once.

She wants TJ to come back in here but she also wants to grab him and run out of this house and never fucking come back. She wants things to be different. She wants her father to stop being a fucking prideful prick and just admit that he was never ready to be a father, probably was never going to be, but he went and did it anyway. She wants _both_ of them to just fucking say, _we fucked it all up and we’re sorry._ She wants it never to have been fucked up in the first place.

“Your grandfather was no peach either,” her father says, and somewhere in her gut Beau knows this, has known it for a while. Thoreau and Clara aren’t horrible people, they aren’t monsters, but they did damage, damage that cannot be undone and they won’t just fucking _own up to it._ Gods, that’s all Beau even really wants, at this point. She looks up at her father. “There’s — there’s difficulty in realizing how much you intended to be different. And then to realize that you’ve become so similar. So, I hope that with the company you keep, maybe you won’t repeat the same mistakes I have. By treating the people around you.”

 _It is not your fault_ , Beau thinks fiercely, so hard that tears bristle in her eyes. _It's not your fault that he's like this. Nothing that you did made him do this to you._ But there is still a part of Beau that is reticent and very small and unrelenting that says— _but there must have been something that you did to deserve this._ She looks over at Jester and shoves that unhelpful thought down.

TJ is still slobbering all over her necklace when he comes back into the room and somehow, that’s the thing that nearly sets Beau over the edge. She crouches down next to him and holds out her hand, grinning when he taps his own against it. “You hang onto that for me, little man,” she whispers. She opens her mouth to say something else, but she can’t make it work. Beau breathes in, wet and heavy from the tears that she doesn’t want to fall.

“Bye Dad,” Beau says and swipes another bottle of wine as she walks out of her house, her friends at her back. It takes Yasha an extra minute or two to make her way down to the rest of them and Beau doesn’t have the bandwidth right now to ask her what that was about. She doesn’t let herself feel embarrassed about it, just clutches at Jester and the rest of them and sinks into her family’s arms, breathing out slow.


End file.
